It's taken a long time for me to be able to admit that to myself, let alone to anyone else, but it's the truth. Nine months I've been dry, but now I'm off the wagon again. Every time I stop I tell myself it'll be the last time – but it never is. I just have to accept it. Playing Football Manager will be something I do for as long as I live.

The thing is, over the past few years I've had reasons to be optimistic about my recovery. The series, I felt, was losing it's addictive potency. Its simplistic, wish-fulfilling appeal. They kept watering down that pure hit of football management role-play with more and more unnecessary ingredients. Press conferences. Match preparation training. Agent conversations. They needed new hooks to keep people buying – I understood that – and, of course, we did, in our thousands. But if you got any group of CM veterans together it wouldn't more than take five minutes for them to start reminiscing about the good old days when you could skim through a season in an afternoon. Win the Champions League with Plymouth using a team of Swedish under-21s. Somewhere along the line, we felt, football management sims had lost their heart.

But now along comes Football Manager 2012 and I'm in as deep as I ever was. I'm about to start my third season with Tonbridge Angels. Even now, as I write this, I can feel the itch. Just one more game – two, perhaps? Three, tops. Then I'll write another paragraph.

The strangest thing of all is that this return to form, and I think I can safely call it that, comes from an iteration perhaps only 5% different from its predecessor. But a critical five.

For starters, the dreaded "match preparation" screen, such an unwanted hassle from last year's edition, has now been smoothly integrated alongside your team's tactics and lineup selection. What was once a chore now makes sense and is much easier to manage. Your assistant will let you know if you're getting it right – and in general he'll be much more helpful then ever before regarding the game's more complex features. A comprehensive tutorial is also thrown in for the first time, for those brand new to the series.

The blurb on the box speaks of an "adaptive layout system" – one of those snazzy marketing terms that sounds impressive but actually conveys very little. But it is this that's at the heart of what makes FM2012 great. There's more information on each screen, and all the different facets of running the club day-to-day – from training to transfers – are much better integrated. It might not sound thrilling, but, put simply, there's less clicking, less dipping in and out of different screens – a better flow, if you will, to your weekly activities. And it all makes for a more immersive experience than we've had for years.

You can also now add another league to your save game at any point – a long-awaited improvement, especially with Conference South budgets to spend on RAM. There's something strangely appealing about upping sticks and heading to the Swiss league after losing in the League Two playoffs; a true Roy Hodgson career path is available to many for the first time. The 3D match engine is also improved but, let's face it, if you care much about that you're probably playing the wrong game.

My favourite tweak however, and one I was pretty cynical about when I read previews of the game, is the improved team talks. You can now address your squad in different tones of voice, and the last thing I wanted, I thought, was more variables which would minutely affect the performance of my team. But the critical part of this new team talk system is the fact that you now get immediate feedback from your players – a simple red or green and a sentence to explain their negative or positive reaction.

Picking the right words at the right time, and sending your lads out suitably motivated for a match quickly becomes one of the most enjoyable aspects of the game. Knowing when to throw tea cups and when to put the proverbial arm around the shoulder feels much more like football management than changing the amount of pressing your right-back is doing by 5%.

Those tiny variables are still there, running beneath the surface. But they've been hidden an away to such an extent that you can trick yourself that things are as simple as they were ten years ago once again. Perhaps that's all I ever wanted. The press conferences are still an annoyance – just give moderate responses to every question or you'll nark off your squad – but this is one small niggle in a game and have, and will continue to, thoroughly enjoy.

So what is there to get excited about, really? Slightly less clicking? A couple of new features? It doesn't seem like much. But somehow they've got the balance just right again. Essentially, you feel more like you're a manager than ever before.

And that's the drug, isn't it? That's the fix. Some nights it's nice to be Batman. Others it's nice to be Andre Villas-Boas. A world I can control, one where a small Kentish team can win the Blue Square South and FA Trophy in their first season, is one I like to play in. Perhaps my recovery shouldn't involve weaning myself off the game. Perhaps my recovery should simply involve realising that everyone needs a little escapism now and then.